Wisdom Moon: Presence in Dying

By Amita Lhamo

Amita Lhamo has woven together a kaleidoscopic journey of sitting at the bedside of dying, communing with nature, and meditating in retreat to show how our contemplations of death opens windows into awareness.

Calling upon her background as a psychotherapist, hospice chaplain, and spiritual practitioner, she leads readers into all the layers of the heart-mind to create a context for understanding presence. She connects the spiritual path to the processes of dying to ask about the soul's journey and the role of death within our spiritual inquiries.

She invites the reader to travel with her into "the beauty of remembering our own origination within the garden of humanity by exploring the nature of presence as revealed in dying."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780998044729

Book preview

WISDOM MOON

Published by Mandorla Publications

Napa, CA 94581

Copyright © 2020 by Amita Lhamo

All rights reserved

This book is nonfiction, reflecting the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated to protect the privacy of individuals and their families.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936925

1 – Spirituality 2 – Psychology

First printing, November 2020

ISBN 978-0-9980447-3-6

ISBN 978-0-9980447-2-9 (ebook)

Printed and bound by McNaughton & Gunn

Designed by Studio Carnelian

Set in Sabon

Mandorla Publications is the publishing imprint for The Mandorla Project, which is dedicated to exploring the relationship between spirituality and care for the dying.

www.themandorlaproject.org

For all my fellow pilgrims.

If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

 CONTENTS 

FOREWORD

Introduction

— CHAPTER ONE —

ENTERING THE FOREST

— CHAPTER TWO —

THE MIRROR OF DEATH

— CHAPTER THREE —

WALKING THROUGH THE VALLEY

— CHAPTER FOUR —

WISDOM MOON

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE MANDORLA PROJECT

Foreword

WHAT ARE YOUR FIRST MEMORIES of moonlight? Can you remember musing in wonder at the moon before you knew anything about why it changes shape, or that moonlight is really the reflected light of the sun?

Our innocence of being can behold mystery before the scientific mind comes into play. Mystery is anything that is unknown to us, and calls us, invites us into a relationship of finding out. As little ones simply, semi-consciously, witnessing the moon changing through its phases, we learned without words that whatever can wax can wane. The natural world constantly speaks to us in the language of impermanence, yet we somehow assume an arrogance of trying our hardest to defy the nature of things. In that itself lies a great mystery. Are you curious?

I love to spend whole days in the wilds of nature without an agenda. Simply being in nature nourishes me and helps restore my felt sense of being simply a human creature on this beautiful earth. All indigenous people were, and are, so woven into the fabric of the natural world that many of the maladies we face as modern folks simply didn’t exist. My grief is endless for what has happened all over the world to our own indigenous people.

When I gaze into the nature all around me, I see everything in phases of waxing and waning. I marvel at the grace with which plants and animals seem to wane, to die. I pray that when my dying time comes, that I may have such grace. As humans we make such a fuss about it.

Every indigenous culture has a world view which embraces both the mysteries of the cosmos and the ways of living responsibly as human stewards of this earth. For them there is the art of living and the art of dying, as well as the science and spirituality of living and dying. As modern people our indigenous sensibility and integrity has fractured. All native elders speak to us and have warned us of the dangers of this, yet we seem to be obliviously on runaway. As we have evolved through the agricultural, industrial, and technological ages, we have also sadly devolved. The more abstracted we become from our intrinsic biocosmic intelligence, the more we split science, art, and spirituality apart. Our human souls and psyches become fragmented, and many of us don’t know how to live, why to live, or how to die.

With close to eight billion of us on the planet now, we can’t go back to indigenous ways of living, and going forward in the ways we are doesn’t look so good. The very earth we walk on, and the water and air that support all life are filled with poisons of our own designs. Waking up to the suffering of this causes many of us to seek counsel outside the paradigms of our modern world views.

Some years after I met my beloved Tibetan teacher, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, I entered his room one morning while he was having breakfast. For some reason, in that moment, I saw how fully embodied he was with the kind of wellness that indigenous people have. In contrast, I felt my own body/mind—a fragmented product of modernity—and thought to myself, No matter what he may be able to teach me, he cannot give me such embodiedness. One has to be raised in a whole different context for that.

In living with Rinpoche for many years, I came to see that the art of Tibetan Buddhism, the science of Buddhist techniques, and the spirituality of the religion were all of one piece for him. He was a fully integrated human being with immense compassion and Awareness wisdom. It brings tears to my eyes in this moment to remember his kindness to me and so many others he cared for.

The Dharma he taught answered many questions I didn’t even know I had, and his transmission showed me the path of freedom from my own self-created sufferings. I have come to love and revere the Dharma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and to also grieve the losses that so much of this tradition has suffered. I dance the edges of preserving a magnificent tradition and making bridges of relevance for our current times. I pray that the sacred ways of Dharma remain on this earth for everyone in all times to come.

When I was emerging from a long meditation retreat, I met a woman whom all of you in the Hospice community knew as Connee Pike. As we talked, and she shared tales from her journey in this life, I was struck by the depth of her inquiry, which led her to meet many wise people and have love for different spiritual paths. Still searching, it seemed that fate led her to me as the next stone to turn over on her quest. After some years of practicing Dharma, she expressed to me her wish to really plumb the depths of it all, and I agreed to guide her in what became a five-year retreat.

From a psychological perspective, the process of deep meditation retreat has parallels to what someone dying, facing a terminal illness, being imprisoned, or being in a war brings to the surface of consciousness. As all the skeletons come out of the closet and normalcy is stripped away, one either freaks out entirely, realizes some profound levels of truth, or a bit of both. The difference is that no one would choose things like illness or prison. Spiritual retreat is a conscious choice made out of love and compassion for all beings. One enters willingly with the task of refining oneself in order to reveal inherent qualities of loving compassion and Awareness wisdom. These qualities are Buddha nature, which is intrinsic to all sentient life forms.

I had the privilege of walking on the path of the Vajrayana with Connee as she plumbed the depths of Dharma, as well as the depths of her soul, soma and psyche. I was moved deeply by her fearless passion for the essence— for truth, and her courage in meeting all the challenges involved in such an endeavor. As I came to see and know some of her qualities, I gave her the name Amita which means unbound—unbounded by anything that would restrict the limitless radiance of compassion and wisdom.

As you will see, Amita masterfully elucidates the forest layers of our human experience, inviting us into ever deeper and widening perspectives, and into the love of what simply is. This gift of hers will become poignantly clear to each of us in times of dissolution, whether that be in deep retreat, or as we end our precious time of living.

I am so delightedly grateful that she has offered herself to the necessity of guiding us and returning us into the wholeness of the art, science and spirituality of dying.

Bless you Dear One.

Lama Drimed Norbu

First Full Moon, Summer 2020

Inverness, CA

Introduction

AS I IMAGINED THIS BOOK, I gathered all my materials into a pile, searched through old files and journals seeking prescient themes, and meditated upon presence.

One night, a guru in my lineage appeared in the clear blue sky and held out his hands as if to offer me a gift. He grinned wildly as the moon appeared between open palms, cycling from new to full to new to full to new before dissolving into its own origination.

A few days later, I learned of the Japanese word joju, which means ever-present or unchanging, although one author preferred everlasting.¹ The pictograph for joju is moon.

It is a koan, of course, for the moon appears differently each night and with each cyclical rotation through the seasons, even as it is a single, unchanging moon within the same sky.

Joju is commonly associated with death.

When I worked as a middle school counselor, I posted a magazine image on my office wall that depicted death dancing with birth. The archetypal figurines in caricatures of black and white circled around the other with enough intimacy to transfigure into a single symbol of yin and yang. On long afternoons I’d contemplate the glossy details, the twirling faces of hope and fear, wondering what, if anything, it had to do with the suffering that traipsed through my office each day.

One afternoon a colleague visited, only a few short weeks after her brother’s unexpected death. She glanced at the image repeatedly, trying to fight back tears. Neither of us spoke, and for a moment, I understood that life always includes death. I could find no words of comfort.

Decades later, I can still find this image within the collage of all I’ve discovered as a psychotherapist, hospice chaplain, and spiritual practitioner, for the wise ones point toward such truthful moments as portals—doorways into the entirety of all we seek. My ongoing dance with dying has changed my views of just about everything, including myself. I can no longer separate the path of dying from the spiritual path itself.

Yet, it wasn’t always this way. Rather, I spent the last thirty-five years looking under the rocks of all that makes us human, wondering what death had to do with any of it. My service as a professional was deeply rooted in a series of questions that led me into the depths of spiritual inquiry and, eventually, into five years of meditation retreat within the Vajrayana tradition.

I entered retreat after a few poignant moments swirled into an inexplicable beckoning, as if the earth itself had pulled out of hibernation to plant a few seeds. With a plenitude of grace, I didn’t ignore them.

The first moment came when a fellow chaplain consulted me on one of those intractable cases that keep us up at night, praying for new solutions. A middle-aged man, with cancer touching nearly every organ in his body, fought anyone who tried to talk to him about the sensibilities of rest, medication, and legal paperwork.

A deeply religious man, he quoted one scripture after another to prove that god would sweep down at the last minute and save him. The chaplain was called because of his religiosity. Our hospice team hoped she could reason with him, for his rhetoric was quickly becoming threats of violence. The entire family was in an uproar, trying to manage the pain.

Like all the others, she too tried to show him that death was near. She used the very same scriptures he cited to point out the possibilities of healing within the context of death. He disregarded her attempts as well.

No one knew what to do, and yet all of us did. We simply had to wait until he figured it out for himself while keeping him and his family as safe as possible.

Perhaps it was her integrity or just the end of a long week, but in frustration she cried out, Why can’t he see it?

The evidence was everywhere, including his inability to stand up or control his own bowels or treat the wounds now festering on both legs. I could hear the unspoken questions of the team in her request. Why can’t any of us convince him? Are we doing something wrong?

I focused on the treatment, all the ways we learn how to stand in the suffering rather than scream at the one suffering. I consoled her frustration—the predicament of holding out medicine to someone who simply can’t receive it.

I’m not sure if this consoled